You wonder.

You wonder about the storm, wonder about the things it may have taken with it when it went away. The dust, the prayers, the hours, the night, the morning. You wonder about roofs, floors, houses. You wonder about children. You wonder about sadness.

You wonder about rain, trickling down glass windows, wonder about rain, whipping at shut doors.

You wonder about overflowing rivers, wonder about books and plastic cups washed away by flood, wonder about wet, shivering skin, about fear, helplessness, loss. You wonder about hope beneath a torrential rain, hope against the wind's merciless lashing, hope despite them.

You wonder about words--do you describe the wind as "howling", "roaring", or "wailing"? You wonder about meaning; you wonder about meaninglessness.

You wonder about the trees: some, uprooted and fallen, streaking the grey streets green; the others, leaning low against the sides of roads, nodding even as the air momentarily keeps still. You wonder about puddles.

You wonder about the blank look on people's faces as they walk under a drizzle, you wonder about their thoughts.

You wonder about darkness and light, wonder about the correct way to strike a match to light a candle, and how there is loveliness in the sound. You wonder how you can think of loveliness at a time like this.

You wonder why the sun shines the way it does right now. You wonder why you wonder.

You wonder what will come next.

Sunlight slanting over surfaces is a breathtakingly beautiful thing. Like sadness, sometimes. Or, certainty.

Throw in particles of dust (star, or fairy), let them glimmer for a little while, and the mind's eye settles.

Exquisiteness is in the seer's point of view.

And because I insist on images, I draw blanks. One after another, empty and unperturbed.

I wonder about the soul in things, turning them inside my head, as I stack stray sheets of hollowness on top of a desk. Loss is hackneyed, its heart a dead river. But we persist in making tangible, demanding preciseness out of space. Drawing blanks, along the way, from dug-up graves, from forgotten gaps.

Diving into this wreck (an exercise on randomness),

these are what I came up with:

A list of things to do, two items in all. A bunch of keys, minus one key. A view from a window, moonlit and square. Left-over sadness in a yellow mug. 

A thin volume of poetry, dog-eared where the months have settled. Some random dream of forgetting, wafting in some fugitive breeze. 

A movie ticket, a concert ticket, four recital programs, three laundry receipts. 

Strings, an unlabeled bottle, forgiveness. Irony. A lotus flower, lilac and plastic. A smooth, round paperweight, squinting under the lamplight. 

A torn piece of laughter. Dust. A pill. 

An empty notebook. Shyness, folded beneath folded years. A pinwheel. 

Four pencils, sharpened and useless. A memory of trees, the comfort in shadows. 

A lone moth. A strand of sunsets. Blue post-its. An unfinished letter. A question. 

Nine questions. No answer. No answers.

Daphne, in my time (part 3)

at its swiftest. The limbs fail

to persevere, though the mind
endures, still, the shadows

lengthen, two shadows--

soon, the night, the shadows,

touching, the plea, the wind,

the truth, one shadow, still,

the other, breaking, finally, the 

end.

Daphne, in my time (part 1)

Loss of breath, the first sign
of the permanence
that will become the end
of this story.

Your absence

brought these lines

into this page.

You are not here.

Once again,

a tree.
This time, the rain.
This time, the night.

Ripple

That's how it is when it comes. First, a teardrop of a thought that falls into clean, clear space. Next, an encumbrance of pain struggling out of the quiet. Then, the surge of memories swelling outward, outward.

And one is back, again, to the stillness.

Except that it's seldom ever the same one.

Roof

four years ago, she was a brown, bent object hunched amongst six years worth of her life--six years' worth, four years ago--wrapped in black garbage bags, huddled, doleful, in the jagged, empty space enough to fit four wheels, a body, just one, in the empty lot beneath the trees--

--the trees. Even now, she thanks those trees, the shade that made the sun's glare seem less harsh, kinder than how he put six years'--no, six years' and a lifetime's--worth of her into those bags as if they were trash

And how to handle fear is to shut it out

shut it out
shut it out
over and over exhale put it in a paper bag and throw it away but is that the way to go or is it to remind oneself that the fear might not be real it is not there it is just a figment a chimera a trick conjured and therefore it is the mind that one has to drill because if one is able to bully the mind then the fear should it be there at all should be there enough near enough to be gripped and gripped hard hard enough that it might soon die from the tightness of the grip but what of the nothingness in the fear what of its not being there but here what of its non-manifestation except in one's dreams in one's thoughts in one's blank spaces where nothing is nothing and only fear is real enough to be because the fear is real or is it but yes it is there is it not or is it here here here

Outside, the drowsy twilight

scatters shadows on the streets:
a tree here a bramble there and shrubs

or someone walking--

Story excerpt turned sudden fiction:

Then there was that time when she, thirteen years old and sulking, refused to eat her meals but for a few bites, staring, instead, out the window and into the street, watching the neighborhood kids playing Patintero. She nibbled incessantly on her fingernails as she listened to a Kiri Te Kenawa selection over and over again, dark circles around her eyes for lack of sleep.

Her father started worrying.

“Don’t mind her. Just some growing pains, I’m sure. She’ll snap out of it soon enough,” Lola Amparing said, looking thoughtfully at her granddaughter, her mind turning like wheels.

That night, Stella found herself drinking—not too willingly—a colorless, bitter liquid, which her Lola Amparing had told her to take.

“That will do you a world of good, believe me. So drink. I don’t want a drop left in that glass, you hear me?”

Stella did as she was told, after little resistance. After the first taste, she grimaced, then finished the rest in one big gulp. She was not one to disobey her elders, and neither was her Lola one to take “no” for an answer.

She went to bed with a bitter aftertaste clinging stubbornly to her tongue. She fell asleep almost the same instant as when her cheek touched the pillow; and the face of the handsome, slightly rugged boy that had stuck itself to her mind for weeks quietly detached itself like a piece of yellowing leaf, blown away by some mysterious wind.

Basic Multiple Choice

Choose the best answer:
a) be happy
b) sulk

Browsing...

How cheerless are these lines?

The rain is falling and it is awfully dark outside. It’s two forty in the afternoon and yet it seems like twilight. There is a congruence to the words twilight and gloom.
Loneliness is a terrible thing. It makes the soul shrink unto itself, like there’s nowhere else to go except inwards, and one does not know what one will find there. Lonely. There is a sense of finality in the letters, as if there is nothing in between them, not even shadows. Just nothing. (July, '05)

or these:

But loneliness. It is twilight, and then the darkness that comes after twilight. It goes away, but is certain to come back. Daylight obscures it, but only for so long.
It is part of, if not the, landscape.
Loneliness, I have to confess, has become one of my favorite words.(July, '05)

Even the description of Maria Callas' singing does not escape the dismals:

...and yet, ultimately, its greatest achievement is that it is able to touch the core of one’s humanity, to stir dormant feelings of sadness, whose cause one can’t seem to trace, exactly. It is, I believe, the primeval sense of loneliness that lives in each of us, and it is this that “La Mamma Morta” gropes around for, and then raises for us to see, if not to acknowledge. (July, '07)

And then add this to the dreariness:

I have long ago taught myself, little by little, to close myself into a bud whenever I feel the threat of pain. (July, '07)

But wait, there's more:

We feel the gargantuan pain (and we're talking physical pain) shooting up from the chest to the throat and we push, push it downwards so that the effort makes breathing difficult that tears start to well up in the eyes. But we don't stop until we know for sure that we've dug deep enough to bury the scream. And, with it, the pain. (January, '08)

Sheesh. I'm glad to have outgrown those.

Or, I hope I have.

So I putter

In some subliminal effort to get to the next page, or step into that twelve-or-forty-eight--hours-later moment, we fidget and tinker and blur our way into one long, hazy series of staccatos.

As if it would matter how we get there. As if it would cross our minds how precious energy and even more precious time are wasted in the getting-there.

Has it ever? Crossed your mind? If so, what did you do?

I had always gone on. Stopping would have meant becoming entangled in my whirl of things, tangible and otherwise.

It would have escaped me, altogether, how it is to come back.

So, move. Move.

I am beginning to hate empty spaces--

--blanknesses that stretch into miles, empty silences that roll upward to crests and fall down to plateaus, ending in emptiness, always emptiness, never-ending.

...
Empty spaces are blank canvasses for what's no longer there.
And silence is an empty space.

I remember punching holes into the air

Pandora

And so you stand there, turning the box in your hand, looking for cracks where you may peep through, examining the angles for irregularities, squinting at invisible lines, lines you know might not be there or might be, thinking, thinking, should you pull the string and risk letting what's inside get out, or should you leave it where you found it, do you remember the exact spot it was sitting on? You're thinking, maybe you're not supposed to be holding it, in the first place, maybe it was meant to just be there, where it was when you saw it, but what if it meant for you to find it, yet how could you be certain that it meant for you to find it?

But, oh, what nice, pleasant possibilities lie inside its four corners, what beauty, what hope? And you, who've been looking for beauty, for hope, how tempting to unwrap the beauty, the hope.

Facebook Status: Such gray, despondent weather. The rains must be bringing on the gloom for some of us.

A room that is really a box, its walls wrapped in ash-tinted blue. Light without rays, barely illuminating a third of the place. Outside, an angry sky pelting heavy sheets of rain and wind.

Where I am, I am not there. I am somewhere else.

Though in that place, I am unsure of my presence, too.

The girl puts a bookmark on the page she's been reading and thinks, the woman in the story is me. I am in the story. This is my story. The valleys and plateaus in the story's plot are the valleys and plateaus of my life. The rivers she almost drowned in, the fires she escaped--they are the same rivers and fires I have survived. The sky that enclosed her world and the stars she gazed at night after night are the sky and the stars of my world.

But the volume is much too thin, she thinks. How will the woman's story end? She is afraid.

She put the book carefully on her bedside table and lays her head on the orange thread-embroidered pillow, knowing fully well that sleep is not about to come anytime soon, no matter that the rest of the neighborhood is quiet and her own room dark as the night outside her porch.

She curbs the urge to reach for the book once more. She is afraid.